dy

Just had a failure last week on my OWC drive. Replacing it wasn't too bad (had to wait a week) but made me realize that with so much stuff in the cloud, the failure of laptop drives doesn't really bug me or slow me down.

Wow - for many years I've dreamed of either building or finding Blocktrix online. Thanks for making my dreams come true :)

RIM cares about it's customers - the carriers and their retail stores.

I'm starting to get perturbed by how much control we relinquish from the consumer - Apple didn't force anyone to wait in line, people did it cause they wanted the device.

There's a price for everything and anyone could have traded their time/money for an iPad earlier, all up to how much you wanted the device.

It was horrible and ruined a great childhood memory for me. Recommend against seeing it if you're a fan - and if you're not - avoid with indifference.

Agreed (I mentioned that it was worth it and I enjoy getting well-formatted eBooks as compared to instapapering everything).

My main point was that e-publishing seems like a tough business since the trend of information pricing seems to be heading to 0.

You can't make this work unless you control the distribution channel (like Youtube). These guys have no shot in hell unless they get someone like Apple to sign on (which is a non-starter).

Agreed - I have no desire to piss off pg considering the value his ideas have provided to me over the years. I considered keeping the collection private because of the copyright issue but one of his essays mentions that they're looking for people for their YC companies who are willing to push the envelope a bit :) Also, I thought about emailing him first but he says he's not responding to emails until September. (All not excuses I know).

That being said, I do wonder where the line is and will be drawn in the coming years. The ePub artifact itself may be controversial (not really sure) but I'm pretty sure I could distribute the code that generates the ePub or create a page that says "click this button to generate the ePub download" and have legal precedent on my side (from the VCR cases and since there isn't any DMCA workaround I'd have to get through for the content).

I recently saw on startuplessonslearned that they're selling their blog content for 29.99 (more than worth it IMO) but at the same time, their target audience could easily circumvent the need to do it either through instapaper, writing their own script or any other myriad of ways.

Awesome - exactly the information I was looking for, will set it up later tonight and post both a new ePub and the source.

icco Added a mobi version (Thanks!) and I put in an updated version that had a few bugs. There are definitely spacing issues etc but you can pretty easily understand the original meaning. Here's the main loop of code that extracts the text, if anyone has a better idea let me know:

  source = open(link['href']).read
  
  text = Readability::Document.new(source, :tags => %w[div p br font]).content
  xhtml_text = Sanitize.clean(text, :elements => ['a', 'div', 'pre', 'br', 'font', 'p', 'img', 'table', 'tr', 'td'], :attributes => {:all => ['class', 'id', 'src', 'href']})
  xhtml_text = Mustache.render(xhtml_template, :title => link.text, :content => xhtml_text)

where ePub formats expect something like

  xhtml_template = <<XHTML
  <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml>
    <head>
    <title>{{title}}</title>
    </head>
    <body>
    <h2>{{title}}</h2>
  {{{content}}}
    </body>
  </html>
  XHTML

Yes, you should Save Link As or something similar.

I was reading the Startup Bible in PDF that I had on my iPhone and decided that such great writing deserved better presentation.

There are some formatting gotcha's, I put this together rather quickly so it uses some libraries that aren't too gentle with pg's circa 2001 HTML formatting.

I hope this doesn't violate pg's sense of copyright of his works, if so, will take down immediately.

Yes, this is truly inspirational (and a kick in the pants for me as well). Would love to see your progress in another six months.

I really think Americans have to either step up to the plate when it comes to doing business with China or just STFU about all the issues we see over there. We complain about human rights violations, lack of freedoms etc but then continue to give this machine our money.

Voting with your voice means very little compared to voting with your wallet. If this upsets you (it doesn't really upset me) then you should leave Facebook.

When Google left China, it made me really admire and appreciate their service (I can't imagine giving more time/money to Google than I already do :)

Another project in a similar vein is project metrics. Various times as I'm reviewing a library to include in my code, I'd like to compare various ones and see where the momentum is, how easy the code is to understand, how much work is being done on it. I think github is starting down this path but would like to see more of this type of thing.

Let's start a "superhero" meme for Engineering hiring. We all know superheroes would crush ninjas and rockstars without lifting a finger :)

But more seriously, I did always find the part of the Superhero origin story where they're also a brilliant engineer to be the most unbelievable - I mean, it's tough to be a good engineer much less having to worry about jumping roof to roof at night, building a superhuman physique and dealing with Lois Lane groupies :)

That's a cool idea of crowdsourcing peak times. You sign up to get texts when people are willing to pay for rides above a certain threshold and then just drive your car out to pick them up.

I'd use it (and possibly do it, although hard to say and it'd have to be for a ridiculous amount of money ~100+ range/trip).

As a New Yorker, I'd have to agree. There already seems to be a glut of taxis for most times of the day (in addition to the higher-end sedans that very few people use).

Any ideas on how you would run this operation at scale?

Curious how the summarization works - are you using something open-source or customized?

Some interesting insights into the culture of Japan (and corporations both Japanese and American). Is there a way we could help that would be more amenable to the Japanese culture and way of handling things?

Saving face is an important aspect of Asian cultures and if we are truly trying to help them on humanitarian grounds, we should try to become more effective rather than bemoan the fact that they have pride in their culture.

It is an interesting test these days to think how would America respond to foreign help/intervention - I didn't follow what happened post-Katrina but it seems like we also downplayed foreign aid and focused on American rescue efforts.

Thanks for the article fat_tony - it was well-written and inspirational.

Regarding the fluffiness comments - sometimes it's good to read the same message over and over again until it sinks in or your mind finally gets it.

I look forward to the other articles!

Increased leverage of the individual. The information age (post-industrial) doesn't need the same labor inputs to achieve the same wealth creation as before.

While this is great for individuals on the right side of the digital divide, we'll continue to see the impact this will have on societies for some time to come.

Real quote: "A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship."

src: http://www.woopidoo.com/business_quotes/authors/john-rockefe...

I think John Rockefeller said it best: "I'd rather turn my business associates my friends than my friends into business associates."

What's interesting to me is that we're in a constant war between the technologies used by governments to control their people and the technologies used by people to uproot their governments. There's a post below about mesh networking, I can see in a few years cell phones being powerful enough to broadcast network over a large enough area that they'll be ad hoc networks without a central kill switch.

One thing I fear is that eventually we'll reach a point where a dictatorship will establish itself and be so cruel and effective that it'll represent a permanent power which will dictate until it's own will to govern expires. North Korea seems like a close enough approximation but with the weapons and technology of the modern world it doesn't take that much creativity for a psychopath to imagine a world where that can occur.

Perhaps it's time I re-read Cryptonomicon.

Also curious what that means for terminal companies like Verifone and CMT.

Yes.

All my reading history across various channels. I think I read news in Hacker News, Instapaper, twitter and Google Reader. I have on many occasions said "I just read this cool article, let me find it for you..." only to spend 20-30 minutes trying to find it with Google site: incantations.

Good point on the cherry-picking of staff members. I could definitely see Google releasing something like Google Me based on their Gmail and if they did something like Buzz, you'd have your entire company (Google App domain) in the open.

In this day and age, information travels fast enough that trying to keep a lid on your top talent is probably useless, but still good to have that information under your control.

Embrace constraints :)

I have linked to another page or perhaps to an Evernote document which is what I used to use for todolists (but their formatting was painful occasionally).

Agreed though, that if they're going to allow notes, the notes should be more full-featured.